Saturday, January 4, 2020

How Long Will It Take For The US To Collapse?

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or “empire” looks like. Modern day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies – They would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.

This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the window for manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.

In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.

There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.

In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.

Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. There’s a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:

“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”

Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.

This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an “economic boom” being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.

The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.

This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.

In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.

Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals an naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.

Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist “Utopia” seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.

The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.

The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than “hiccups” in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.

Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?

As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then “solve” that crisis with globalism.

Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.

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We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing.  Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats.  In my article ‘Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy’, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster.  Two of these events now appear imminent:  The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.

Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame.  This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term.  Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.

But why create a collapse in the first place?  Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. It’s not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form.  The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.

What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.

Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense.  We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization.  We need localized and self sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production.  Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight.  The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience.  We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the “new world order” and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.

Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.

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The Terrifying Rise Of The Zombie State Narrative

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The Terrifying Rise Of The Zombie State Narrative

Authored by Craig Murray,

The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.

No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.

The Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people. Only a very few outliers, like the strange Melanie Phillips, still claimed the WMD really did exist, and her motive was so obviously that she supported any excuse to kill Muslims that nobody paid any attention. Her permanent pass to appear on the BBC was upgraded. But by and large everyone accepted the Iraqi WMD had been a fiction. The mainstream media Blair/Bush acolytes like Cohen, Kamm and Aaronovitch switched to arguing that even if WMD did not exist, Iraq was in any case better off for having so many people killed and its infrastructure destroyed.

These situations are now avoided by the realisation of the security services that in future they just have to brazen it out. The simple truth of the matter – and it is a truth – is this. If the Iraq WMD situation occurred today, and the security services decided to brazen it out and claim that WMD had indeed been found, there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.

The security services outlet Bellingcat would publish some photos of big missiles planted in the sand. The Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, BBC and CNN would republish and amplify these pictures and copy and paste the official statements from government spokesmen. Robert Fisk would get to the scene and interview a few eye witnesses who saw the missiles being planted, and he would be derided as a senile old has-been. Seymour Hersh and Peter Hitchens would interview whistleblowers and be shunned by their colleagues and left off the airwaves. Bloggers like myself would be derided as mad conspiracy theorists or paid Russian agents if we cast any doubt on the Bellingcat “evidence”. Wikipedia would ruthlessly expunge any alternative narrative as being from unreliable sources. The Integrity Initiative, 77th Brigade, GCHQ and their US equivalents would be pumping out the “Iraqi WMD found” narrative all over social media. Mad Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council would be banning dissenting accounts all over the place in his role as Facebook Witchfinder-General.

Does anybody seriously wish to dispute this is how the absence of Iraqi WMD would be handled today, 16 years on?

If you do wish to doubt this could happen, look at the obviously fake narrative of the Syrian government chemical weapons attacks on Douma. The pictures published on Bellingcat of improvised chlorine gas missiles were always obviously fake. Remember this missile was supposed to have smashed through ten inches of solid, steel rebar reinforced concrete.

As I reported back in May last year, that the expert engineers sent to investigate by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) did not buy into this is hardly surprising.

That their findings were deliberately omitted from the OPCW report is very worrying indeed. What became still more worrying was the undeniable evidence that started to emerge from whistleblowers in the OPCW that the toxicology experts had unanimously agreed that those killed had not died from chlorine gas attack. The minutes of the OPCW toxicology meeting really do need to be read in full.

actual_toxicology_meeting_redacted

The highlights are:

“No nerve agents had been detected in environmental or bio samples”
“The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”

I really do urge you to click on the above link and read the entire minute. In particular, it is impossible to read that minute and not understand that the toxicology experts believed that the corpses had been brought and placed in position.

“The experts were also of the opinion that the victims were highly unlikely to have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments, at such a short distance from an escape from any toxic chlorine gas to much cleaner air”.

So the toxicology experts plainly believed the corpse piles had been staged, and the engineering experts plainly believed the cylinder bombs had been staged. Yet, against the direct evidence of its own experts, the OPCW published a report managing to convey the opposite impression – or at least capable of being portrayed by the media as giving the opposite impression.

How then did the OPCW come to do this? Rather unusually for an international organisation, the OPCW Secretariat is firmly captured by the Western states, largely because it covers an area of activity which is not of enormous interest to the political elites of developing world states, and many positions require a high level of technical qualification. It was also undergoing a change of Director General at the time of the Douma investigation, with the firmly Francoist Spanish diplomat Fernando Arias taking over as Director General and the French diplomat Sebastian Braha effectively running the operation as the Director-General’s chef de cabinet, working in close conjunction with the US security services. Braha simply ordered the excision of the expert opinions on engineering and toxicology, and his high-handedness worked, at least until whistleblowers started to reveal the truth about Braha as a slimy, corrupt, lying war hawk.

FFM here stands for Fact Finding Mission and ODG for Office of the Director General. After a great deal of personal experience dealing with French diplomats, I would say that the obnoxious arrogance revealed in Braha’s instructions here is precisely what you would expect. French diplomats as a class are a remarkably horrible and entitled bunch. Braha has no compunction about simply throwing around the weight of the Office of the Director General and attempting to browbeat Henderson.

We see now how the OPCW managed to produce a report which was the opposite of the truth. Ian Henderson, the OPCW engineer who had visited the site and concluded that the “cylinder bombs” were fakes, had suddenly become excluded from the “fact finding mission” when it had been whittled down to a “core group” – excluding any engineers (and presumably toxicologists) who would seek to insert inconvenient facts into the report.

France of course participated, alongside the US and UK, in missile strikes against Syrian government positions in response to the non-existent chlorine gas attacks on Douma. I was amongst those who had argued from day one that the western Douma narrative was inherently improbable. The Douma enclave held by extreme jihadist, western and Saudi backed forces allied to ISIL, was about to fall anyway. The Syrian government had no possible military advantage to gain by attacking it with two small improvised chemical weapons, and a great deal to lose in terms of provoking international retaliation.

That the consequences of the fake Douma incident were much less far-reaching than they might have been, is entirely due (and I am sorry if you dislike this but it is true) to the good sense of Donald Trump. Trump is inclined to isolationism and the fake “Russiagate” narrative promoted by senior echelons of his security services had led him to be heavily sceptical of them. He therefore refused, against the united persuasion of the hawks, to respond to the Douma “attack” by more than quick and limited missile strikes. I have no doubt that the object of the false flag was to push the US into a full regime change operation, by falsifying a demonstration that a declared red line on chemical weapon use had been crossed.

There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable. In addition to the two whistleblowers reported extensively by Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens has his own whistleblowers inside OPCW who may well be different persons. It is also great entertainment as well as enlightening to read Hitchens’ takedown of Bellingcat on the issue.

But there are much deeper questions about the Douma false flag. Did the jihadists themselves kill the “chlorine victims” for display or were these just bodies from the general fighting? The White Helmets were co-located with the jihadist headquarters in Douma, and involved in producing and spreading the fake evidence. How far were the UK and US governments, instrumental in preparing the false flag? That western governments, including through the White Helmets and their men at the OPCW, were plainly seeking to propagate this false flag, to massively publicise and to and make war capital out of it, is beyond dispute. But were they involved in the actual creation of the fake scene? Did MI6 or the CIA initiate this false flag through the White Helmets or the Saudi backed jihadists? That is unproven but seems to me very probable. It is also worth noting the coincidence in time of the revelation of the proof of the Douma false flag and the death of James Le Mesurier.

Now let me return to where I started. None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.

Those sources who do publish the truth – including the few outliers in mainstream media such as Peter Hitchens and Robert Fisk – continue to be further marginalised, attacked as at best eccentric and at worse Russian agents. Others like Wikileaks and myself are pariahs excluded from any mainstream exposure. The official UK, US, French and Spanish government line, and the line of the billionaire and state owned media, continues to be that Douma was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on civilians. They intend, aided and abetted by their vast online propaganda operations, to brazen out the lie.

What we are seeing is the terrifying rise of the zombie state narrative in Western culture. It does not matter how definitively we can prove that something is a lie, the full spectrum dominance of the Establishment in media resources is such that the lie is impossible to kill off, and the state manages to implant that lie as the truth in the minds of a sufficient majority of the populace to ride roughshod over objective truth with great success. It follows in the state narrative that anybody who challenges the state’s version of truth is themselves dishonest or mad, and the state manages also to implant that notion into a sufficient majority of the populace.

These are truly chilling times.

In the next instalment I shall consider how the Establishment is brazening out similar lies on the Russophobe agenda, and sticking to factually debunked narratives on the DNC and Podesta emails, on the Steele Dossier and on the Skripals.

*  *  *

Unlike his adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, Craig's blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate. Subscriptions to keep Craig's blog going are gratefully received.

Tyler Durden Sat, 01/04/2020 - 07:00
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Is Kevin Spacey straight-up murdering his accusers?



Three of Kevin Spacey’s accusers have died, and people are very concerned. In 2018, Spacey began a Christmas tradition that literally no one asked for: posting videos of himself embodying his House of Cards character Frank Underwood.

ORIGINAL LINK

Friday, January 3, 2020

NYT claims journalists faced 'darkest year' in 2019 under Trump, fails to mention zero were jailed

ORIGINAL LINK

The New York Times is being taken to task for a recent report claiming 2019 was "the darkest yet for journalists in the Trump era."

The Monday piece in The New York Times spent much of its time totaling the number of times President Donald Trump said "fake news" this year (273, if you are counting).

It bemoaned the lack of daily media briefings and that White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham prefers to speak to Fox News.

The report also sought to tar Trump with restrictions on the media abroad.

"Mr. Trump’s vilification of the news media is a hallmark of his tenure and a jagged break from the norms of his predecessors: Once a global champion of the free press, the presidency has become an inspiration to autocrats and dictators who ape Mr. Trump’s cry of 'fake news,'" The Times claimed.

The Times quoted Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, as claiming that at least 30 journalists were jailed last year and charged with false reporting.

“We view that as governments around the world taking advantage of the Trump ‘fake news’ framing and using that as a pretext of imprisoning journalists,” Simon said.

“The dissemination of that rhetoric has only increased in the last 12 months. It’s having a very negative effect.”

But there was a flaw in the argument, as reported by The Daily Caller, which noted that there is not one American journalist imprisoned in what The Times portrayed as the epicenter of attacks on the media.

The Committee to Protect Journalists compiled a report of journalists imprisoned in 2019.

The scorecard showed the U.S. with no journalists behind bars out of the 250 reported jailed around the world, a fact that was not mentioned by The Times in its condemnation of Trump.

Joe Concha, a reporter for The Hill, also pushed back on the verdict delivered by The Times.

In a Thursday interview on the Fox News morning program "Fox & Friends," he said he "profoundly disagreed" with The Times report.

Concha said former President Barack Obama's administration "rejected more FOIA requests -- Freedom of Information Act requests -- than any other administration."

"I don't remember The New York Times talking about how that was a dark time for journalists because they agreed with the administration that was in power at that time," he said.

Trump is often available to journalists in ways past presidents were not, Concha argued.

"We always hear how President Trump is a big threat to journalists and reporters," Concha said. "He has taken more questions directly from reporters than Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan."

"How is he a threat, therefore, if you're speaking to the man himself?"

According to Concha, Trump is exercising his right to push back against a media that covers him "at a clip of 92 percent, 93 percent negative."

"It's not just that the reporting is negative, it has become obviously hostile," he said. "So when he criticizes them back ... he is exercising his First Amendment right."

"He has every right to criticize the press," Concha concluded.

After reading The Times piece, Clay Waters, writing for NewsBusters, said its bottom line was, "Criticize the media, and you’re threatening the freedoms and lives of journalists."

"One doesn’t have to condone Trump’s 'enemy of the people' language to see the illogic in blaming Trump for everything bad that happens to journalists worldwide," he wrote.

Others noted that it is the media, not Trump, that needs to reform.

"It is the time of year for New Year’s resolutions and nobody is in need of reform more than the executives who run the big media news outlets," Jeffrey M. McCall wrote in an Op-Ed on CNS News.

"Unsurprisingly, the news-consuming public has generally lost confidence in the journalism industry. Journalists are supposed to serve as surrogates of the citizenry, serving the information needs of a democracy. Instead, the news industry is now viewed as more interested in riding ideological high horses than serving its mission," he wrote.

"The news media stumbled through a series of high profile blunders during 2019, beginning last January with frenzied and misdirected coverage of the Covington Catholic high school students in Washington," he added. "The news industry was then snookered by Jussie Smollett, giving the Smollett story way too much time and space, and failing to scrutinize a situation that had 'dubious' written all over it."

"The media hyperventilated over the Mueller investigation for the first several months of 2019, trying to anticipate what Mueller would find, even though there were basically no facts on which to base such speculation. When the Mueller report at long last surfaced, without the bombshell affirmation of Trump-Russia collusion, the media lost interest and stepped away."

"The year 2020 will provide many challenges for America, with the upcoming general election, divisive cultural issues and dangers abroad. The news industry should consider how it can help inform a nation as it navigates through these challenges, rather than to serve as a hindrance to understanding," McCall said.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post NYT claims journalists faced 'darkest year' in 2019 under Trump, fails to mention zero were jailed appeared first on WND.



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Bloody Harvest—How Everyone Ignored the Crime of the Century

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In June of this year the China Tribunal delivered its Final Judgement and Summary Report.1 An independent committee composed of lawyers, human rights experts, and a transplant surgeon, the Tribunal was established to investigate forced organ harvesting on the Chinese mainland. These rumours have haunted the country for years—lurid tales of the fate suffered by members of the banned Falun Gong religion after being taken into police custody. Their organs, so the rumours go, are cut from their bodies while they are still alive, and then transplanted into waiting patients.

The Tribunal examined these claims, extending the group of victims to include Uyghur Muslims (among others), and its findings were unambiguous. “On the basis of all direct and indirect evidence, the Tribunal concludes with certainty that forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.”2 Further to this, “the PRC and its leaders actively incited the persecution, the imprisonment, murder, torture, and the humiliation of Falun Gong practitioners with the sole purpose of eliminating the practice of, and belief in, the value of Falun Gong.”3 The Tribunal was also able to conclude, “with certainty,” that the Communist Party has been responsible for acts of torture inflicted on Uyghurs.4 These acts were found to constitute crimes against humanity.5

The Falun Gong religious group was outlawed in China twenty years ago, with President Jiang Zemin apparently deciding that the group’s expansion was a potential threat to his power—a competitor for the loyalties of the Chinese people. He branded the group an ‘evil cult’. The ensuing imprisonment and disappearance of large numbers of practitioners coincided with an enormous, unexplained provision of transplant hospitals, and a flood of new laboratories. Research into immunosuppressant drugs suddenly accelerated.6 China did not actually have a formal organ donation scheme until 2013, but this has presented no obstacle to the country’s transplant surgeons. They have been charging ahead with an estimated 69,300 transplants per year.7 Even the formal voluntary donors that now exist cannot hope to match this number: in 2017 the total number of eligible donors in the country was a paltry 5,146.8

Throughout most of the world the disparity between donor numbers and patient numbers leads to long waiting lists, but in China it is possible to get a heart transplant within a matter of days,9 and some individuals have been told that they can travel to the mainland on a specific date and immediately receive their transplant.10 In other words, the Chinese authorities know exactly when a particular person is due to die, and they can guarantee that a healthy heart will be found in the to-be-deceased. As stated in the Final Judgement, this “could only occur if there was an available bank of potential living donors who could be sacrificed to order.”11

The Tribunal heard that both Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners received regular blood tests in detention. According to the testimony of former prisoner Gulbahar Jelilova, injections were given once every ten days, along with regular ultrasound tests.12 The blood cannot have been taken for the purpose of transfusion, because the quantities were too small. The purpose cannot have been infection control, because blood was only taken from the Falun Gong and Uyghur prisoners, rather than the entire population of each prison. There is, however, another reason that the authorities might need to take blood in this way. Blood testing is essential for organ transplantation, because the procedure involves a danger that the beneficiary’s antibodies will interact with antigens in the donor organs, prompting the body to reject the new organs. As for the ultrasound tests, these were surely carried out to establish the structural appearance and condition of internal organs, and this too is consistent with planned organ transplantation.13

It turns out that the Communist Party is hardly bothering to hide the identity of its human sacrifices. The Tribunal heard recordings of telephone calls made to Chinese hospitals by investigators from the World Organisation to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG). Requests were made, in Mandarin, for organ transplants. When the callers enquired about the sources, most hospital staff were happy to reveal that the organs would be coming from Falun Gong prisoners (all that clean living and qigong exercise is thought to guarantee healthy body parts).14 In their arrogance, the Chinese authorities do not expect serious condemnation. In fact, they are now expanding the project. Human rights investigator Ethan Gutmann provided evidence to the Tribunal in December 2018, stating that “over the last 18 months, literally every Uyghur man, woman, and child – about 15 million people – have been blood and DNA tested, and that blood testing is compatible with tissue matching.”

All Falun Gong practitioners appearing as witnesses before the Tribunal were also able to describe the torture they suffered in detention. While none of these testimonies could be independently verified (for obvious reasons), the level of detail was striking, as were the similarities in the accounts. Prisoners were stripped, beaten, and kept awake for as much as 20 days at a time. Electric batons were used as a matter of course.15 The Final Judgement and Summary Report includes a vivid description of the ordeal of practitioner Jintao Liu: “They shoved faeces into his mouth. They forced a toilet brush handle into his anus. They pushed the handle so hard that he couldn’t defecate… They woke him at night by pouring cold water on him, or by piercing his skin with needles.”16 Women were given pills that stopped their menstrual cycles and caused disorientation, and many of them suffered mental breakdowns.17 Rape was routine: the prisoner Yin Liping told the Tribunal that she was locked in a room with more than forty men of unknown identity in the Masanjia Labour Camp on 19 April 2001, and raped by all of them.18

Incredibly, the Final Judgement has received minimal press coverage, despite the magnitude of the crimes described and the prestige of the Tribunal’s panel. The chair was Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, a barrister for forty-eight years and a judge for thirty-four. This was the man who led the prosecution of Serbian president Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević at the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The panel also included human rights lawyers from the United States, Iran, and Malaysia, and a thoracic transplant specialist of several decades’ standing.

The findings may have been dramatic, but the Tribunal’s approach was every bit as measured and sober as we might expect from a panel of such repute. Members were “alive to the risk of group enthusiasm operating on the minds of witnesses who are Falun Gong supporters.”19 They took care to avoid bias against the CCP, adopting the practice of examining each category of evidence in isolation, with the relevant evidence treated as if it related to an imaginary state with an excellent human rights record.20 Invitations to attend proceedings or to comment or provide evidence were sent out to China’s Ambassador to London, and also to various Chinese transplant physicians, and even Western doctors who have spoken in support of the Chinese regime (none took up the Tribunal’s offer).21 All of this seems like the kind of professionalism we would hope for. Why, then, has the China Tribunal been effectively ignored?

One reason could be that the international community has already made up its mind about this issue. The Transplantation Society and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have both stated that criticism of the Chinese human transplant system is unwarranted,22 and as the Tribunal’s Judgement admits, many separate governments and international organisations have also expressed their doubts concerning the allegations.23 There are exceptions—the governments of Israel, Spain, Italy, and Taiwan have now banned citizens from travelling to China for transplant surgery—but it has been far more common to raise a sceptical eyebrow at the reports.

This doubt may result in part from the movement’s alien ring to Western ears. Falun Gong? What the hell is that? Is it some kind of religion? Practitioners have often tried to insist that they are not a religion, not political, and not an organisation of any kind, but this has simply left open the question of what they are, exactly. The temptation has been to swallow the mainland propaganda, dismissing the group as a cult. Indeed, Gutmann observed the same Western suspicions in the wake of the Communist Party’s original crackdown in 1999: “Congress avoided using Falun Gong practitioners’ testimony in hearings, while the administration concentrated on the human rights of ‘traditional’ Chinese dissidents and the occasional House Christian. Hollywood stuck to the Dalai Lama.”24 If these people have questionable beliefs about the nature of reality, the West seemed to be asking, then why should we trust them about anything at all? But this attitude, says Ethan Gutmann, is like devaluing the currency to zero simply because there are counterfeit bills in circulation.

It is also worth noting that Uyghur Muslims were mentioned in the Tribunal’s Final Judgement. Falun Gong may be a mystery, but Islam should be familiar enough to Western governments. Sir Geoffrey Nice and his colleagues were quite clear that Uyghurs have been the victims of a crime against humanity. Why was the latter detail not picked up in the press? Perhaps it was simply lost in this year’s rush of coverage relating to the Xinjiang concentration camps.

The doubts of the international community may not result solely from a distaste for the Falun Gong. The British government has stated on several occasions that the evidence is insufficient to prove that forced organ harvesting has taken place. These statements might give the impression that the government has already carried out a careful examination of the available material. Indeed, Baroness Goldie and MP Mark Field have both made reference in Parliament to certain ‘analysis’ and ‘assessment’. However, the Tribunal’s requests to the Foreign Office to provide details of this analysis and assessment were always met with silence. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that no such analysis ever took place. This should lead us to ask what reasons the UK government might have to avoid investigating reports of egregious human rights violations.25 As for the WHO, it “operates in a multilateral stakeholder environment and may well be susceptible to political realities,” in the cutting observation of the Tribunal.26

Of course, we could give these governments and organisations the benefit of the doubt, attributing to them nothing more malign than a misguided scepticism. This would still be no excuse. The horror unveiled by the Tribunal was, if anything, a conservative estimate of the scale of the tragedy. The conclusions about organ harvesting related only to the Falun Gong—the Tribunal reached no similar conclusions about the Uyghurs (or House Christians, or Tibetan Buddhists, or Eastern Lightning).27 But testimonies abound, if we care to look for them. A defecting policeman has told Ethan Gutmann that when Uyghur prisoners were taken to be executed, they went with doctors in “special vans for harvesting organs.” Afterwards the bodies were encased in cement and buried in secrecy.28

Gutmann spoke to such doctors—men who had carried out blood tests on Uyghurs just as described in the Tribunal’s Final Judgement and Summary Report. They were able to provide him with the missing details. First, news would arrive that Communist Party officials had checked into a hospital with various organ problems. Staff would begin taking blood from Uyghurs at the prison, and when a corresponding blood type was found, they would move to tissue matching. The chosen prisoners would be shot in the right side of the chest so that death did not occur instantly. Blood types would be matched at the execution site, and soon enough “the officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out.”29

No figures are available for the scale of Uyghur harvesting, but it should be clear that the China Tribunal presented only a small piece of the full tragedy. Indeed, it may never be possible to calculate any of the Chinese harvesting figures with real accuracy. The Falun Gong numbered 70 million when their own crackdown began30 —a small nation—and these millions were scattered in every direction. Some fled overseas in search of asylum, some went underground on the mainland, some renounced their former beliefs, some died in agony on cell floors or in the Party’s many specially-designed torture chambers. And some were harvested. Gutmann puts the latter figure at 65,000 during the early years (2000 to 2008), but arrest records—or records of any kind – are minimal.31 From the very beginning, practitioners were being wheeled into operating theatres in nameless droves.

Throughout 2006 the Falun Gong-run newspaper Epoch Times recorded a series of anecdotes from a single hospital in Sujiatun during those early years. One of these came from an accounting department employee who had become concerned about her husband, a surgeon at the hospital. He had been working strange hours, earning higher wages than normal, and displaying signs of mental breakdown. After nearly a year of this her husband came clean. He told her that there were extra patients hidden away in the subterranean depths of the hospital. The doctors were summoned whenever these special patients arrived, and they were expected to apply anaesthetic before removing the kidneys, skin tissue, corneas, and other organs. Some patients were still alive at the end while others were not, but all of them were quickly sent to the incinerator, after which the hospital staff would pocket rings and watches. Her husband told her that the patients were Falun Gong practitioners, and he said that there was never any need for paperwork.32

The Sujiatun accounts were dismissed by many because US officials from the regional consular office went to have a look for themselves. They found “no evidence that the site is being used for any function than as a normal public hospital.” But as Gutmann points out, “three weeks had elapsed between the publication of the first story in the Epoch Times and the consular visit – an eternity by Chinese construction standards.”33

There is too much of this to ignore. It is not possible, in good conscience, to simply dismiss the allegations. The Tribunal posed a thought experiment to demonstrate this: “Supposing it were said of either the UK or the USA that Muslims were being tortured to death in a prison in Leeds or Philadelphia… (and) that the allegations were entirely untrue although (they had been) made by a perfectly respectable organisation and had attracted attention in government committees in various countries. Would the simple denial be all that the UK or the USA would do on grounds that their word should be enough, and that it would be to honour an impertinence by doing more? Or might they do a great deal more, including… seeking redress from whoever made the totally false but believable allegation, and… throwing open the gates of the prison and offering sight of all records to an appropriate neutral team of observers?”34

The organ harvesting allegations have continued for the best part of two decades, and they show no sign of stopping. A major report was published as early as 2006 by two Canadian human rights attourneys, David Kilgour and David Matas (later expanded into a book, Bloody Harvest: Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China). The evidence has continued to mount over the years, culminating in the investigations of the China Tribunal, and yet still the doubts persist. In the context of the sheer gravity of the allegations and the extended period over which they have been made, many international organisations and governments now stand condemned along with the Chinese Communist Party.

The evidence points to the crime of the century thus far, and a crime that bears comparison with the worst of the last century. “Victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge, or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse,” in the Tribunal’s blunt assessment.35 One of the chief culprits for this crime must surely be China’s leader at the time of the Falun Gong crackdown—the psychopathic Jiang Zemin. “Beating them to death is nothing,” Jiang is reported to have said. “If they are disabled from the beating, it counts as them injuring themselves. If they die, it counts as suicide!”36 Equally culpable are his most enthusiastic lieutenants: Bo Xilai, Wang Lijun, Zhou Yongkang.

However, the guilt is also shared by many ordinary individuals: surgeons, officials, prison guards, police. And they know it. “We are all going to hell,” said a Chinese medical director to a policeman who was working with him at the execution grounds, according to the latter’s testimony to Ethan Gutmann.37 Judgement has been delayed for the time being. But these crimes have been well documented by many brave individuals now, and the condemnation of history is inevitable. Eventually children across the world will read in their school textbooks about the Falun Gong Holocaust of the early twenty-first century, and everyone will know the names of the main perpetrators.

 

Aaron Sarin is a freelance writer living in Sheffield and currently working on a book about the nation-state system, cultural universals, and global governance. He regularly contributes to seceder.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @aaron_sarin 

Feature photo: Hundreds of supporters of the Chinese Falun Gong movement marched through the Prague centre on September 28, 2018, celebrating the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, but also warning of the persecution of the movement in China. Ondrej Deml/CTK Photo/Alamy Live News

References:
1 Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China – Final Judgement and Summary Report, 17 June 2019

2 Ibid., p19
3 Ibid., p35
4 Ibid., p25
5 Ibid., p53
6 Ibid., pp. 14-5
7 Ibid., pp. 30-1
8 Ibid., p45
9 Ibid., p32
10 Ibid., p18
11 Ibid., pp. 32-3
12 Ibid., pp. 24-5
13 Ibid., pp. 19-1
14 Ibid., p27
15 Ibid., pp. 26-7
16 Ibid., p22
17 Ibid., pp. 24-5
18 Ibid., p26
19 Ibid., p7
20 Ibid., p9
21 Ibid., p6
22 Ibid., p37
23 Ibid., p1
24 Ethan Gutmann – The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to its Dissident Problem (Prometheus Books, New York, 2014), pp. 103-4
25 Final Judgement and Summary Report, op. cit., p38
26 Ibid., p37
27 Ibid., p47
28 Gutmann, op. cit., p23
29 Ibid., p26
30 Ibid., p70
31 Ibid., p279
32 Ibid., p222
33 Ibid., pp. 222-3
34 Final Judgement and Summary Report, op. cit., p41
35 Final Judgement and Summary Report, op. cit., p1
36 Ibid., p13
37 Gutmann, op. cit., p17

The post Bloody Harvest—How Everyone Ignored the Crime of the Century appeared first on Quillette.



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WORLD EXCLUSIVE : Mother of Sexually Abused Boy Bander Breaks Her Silence, Implicates Disney, CAA, Hollywood Records, LAPD, DA & Industry Elite in Pedophile Ring & Cover-up



Hollywood only wants certain stories to be told. The stories where underage kids are plied with alcohol at the homes of glittery celebrities, like Chris Pratt and Anna Faris, and then sexually abused by adults in the industry aren’t stories anyone in tinsel town wants you to hear.

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You're Not The Man Your Father Was



According to a recent report from JAMA, testosterone therapy among American men is on the rise. From 2010 to 2013, prescriptions more than doubled, which researchers partially attribute to ubiquitous drug marketing campaigns urging older men to boost “low T” levels.

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The USA Doubles Down on its Saudi Allegiance

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For the United States to abandon proxy warfare and directly kill one of Iran’s most senior political figures has changed international politics in a fundamental way. It is a massive error. Its ramifications are profound and complex.

There is also a lesson to be learned here in that this morning there will be excitement and satisfaction in the palaces of Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Tehran. All of the political elites will see prospects for gain from the new fluidity. While for ordinary people in all those countries there is only the certainty of more conflict, death and economic loss, for the political elite, the arms manufacturers, the military and security services and allied interests, the hedge funds, speculators and oil companies, there are the sweet smells of cash and power.

Tehran will be pleased because the USA has just definitively lost Iraq. Iraq has a Shia majority and so naturally tends to ally with Iran. The only thing preventing that was the Arab nationalism of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Socialist Party. Bush and Blair were certainly fully informed that by destroying the Ba’ath system they were creating an Iranian/Iraqi nexus, but they decided that was containable. The “containment” consisted of a deliberate and profound push across the Middle East to oppose Shia influence in proxy wars everywhere.

This is the root cause of the disastrous war in Yemen, where the Zaidi-Shia would have been victorious long ago but for the sustained brutal aerial warfare on civilians carried out by the Western powers through Saudi Arabia. This anti-Shia western policy included the unwavering support for the Sunni Bahraini autocracy in the brutal suppression of its overwhelmingly Shia population. And of course it included the sustained and disastrous attempt to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria and replace it with pro-Saudi Sunni jihadists.

This switch in US foreign policy was known in the White House of 2007 as “the redirection”. It meant that Sunni jihadists like Al-Qaida and later al-Nusra were able to switch back to being valued allies of the United States. It redoubled the slavish tying of US foreign policy to Saudi interests. The axis was completed once Mohammad Bin Salman took control of Saudi Arabia. His predecessors had been coy about their de facto alliance with Israel. MBS felt no shyness about openly promoting Israeli interests, under the cloak of mutual alliance against Iran, calculating quite correctly that Arab street hatred of the Shia outweighed any solidarity with the Palestinians. Common enemies were easy for the USA/Saudi/Israeli alliance to identify; Iran, the Houthi, Assad and of course the Shia Hezbollah, the only military force to have given the Israelis a bloody nose. The Palestinians themselves are predominantly Sunni and their own Hamas was left friendless and isolated.

The principal difficulty of this policy for the USA of course is Iraq. Having imposed a rough democracy on Iraq, the governments were always likely to be Shia dominated and highly susceptible to Iranian influence. The USA had a continuing handle through dwindling occupying forces and through control of the process which produced the government. They also provided financial resources to partially restore the physical infrastructure the US and its allies had themselves destroyed, and of course to fund a near infinite pool of corruption.

That US influence was balanced by strong Iranian aligned militia forces who were an alternative source of strength to the government of Baghdad, and of course by the fact that the centre of Sunni tribal strength, the city of Falluja, had itself been obliterated by the United States, three times, in an act of genocide of Iraqi Sunni population.

Through all this the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi had until now tiptoed with great care. Pro-Iranian yet a long term American client, his government maintained a form of impartiality based on an open hand to accept massive bribes from anybody. That is now over. He is pro-Iranian now.

Such precarious balance as there ever was in Iraq was upset this last two months when the US and Israelis transported more of their ISIL Sunni jihadists into Iraq, to escape the pincer of the Turkish, Russian and Syrian government forces. The Iranians were naturally not going to stand for this and Iranian militias were successfully destroying the ISIL remnants, which is why General Qassem Suleimani was in Iraq, why a US mercenary assisting ISIL was killed in an Iranian militia rocket attack, and why Syrian military representatives were being welcomed at Baghdad airport.

It is five years since I was last in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but it is extraordinarily heavily fortified with military barriers and checks every hundred yards, and there is no way the crowd could have been allowed to attack the US Embassy without active Iraqi government collusion. That profound political movement will have been set in stone by the US assassination of Suleimani. Tehran will now have a grip on Iraq that could prove to be unshakable.

Nevertheless, Tel Aviv and Riyadh will also be celebrating today at the idea that their dream of the USA destroying their regional rival Iran, as Iraq and Libya were destroyed, is coming closer. The USA could do this. The impact of technology on modern warfare should not be underestimated. There is a great deal of wishful thinking that fantasises about US military defeat, but it is simply unrealistic if the USA actually opted for full scale invasion. Technology is a far greater factor in warfare than it was in the 1960s. The USA could destroy Iran, but the cost and the ramifications would be enormous, and not only the entire Middle East but much of South Asia would be destabilised, including of course Pakistan. My reading of Trump remains that he is not a crazed Clinton type war hawk and it will not happen. We all have to pray it does not.

There will also today be rejoicing in Washington. There is nothing like an apparently successful military attack in a US re-election campaign. The Benghazi Embassy disaster left a deep scar upon the psyche of Trump’s support base in particular, and the message that Trump knows how to show the foreigners not to attack America is going down extremely well where it counts, whatever wise people on CNN may say.

So what happens now? Consolidating power in Iraq and finishing the destruction of ISIL in Iraq will be the wise advance that Iranian statesman can practically gain from these events. But that is, of course, not enough to redeem national honour. Something quick and spectacular is required for that. It is hard not to believe there must be a very real chance of action being taken against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz, which Iran can do with little prior preparation. Missile attacks on Saudi Arabia or Israel are also well within Iran’s capability, but it seems more probable that Iran will wish to strike a US target rather than a proxy. An Ambassador may be assassinated. Further missile strikes against US outposts in Iraq are also possible. All of these scenarios could very quickly lead to disastrous escalation.

In the short term, Trump in this situation needs either to pull out troops from Iraq or massively to reinforce them. The UK does not have the latter option, having neither men nor money, and should remove its 1400 troops now. Whether the “triumph” of killing Suleimani gives Trump enough political cover for an early pullout – the wise move – I am unsure. 2020 is going to be a very dangerous year indeed.

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The post The USA Doubles Down on its Saudi Allegiance appeared first on Craig Murray.



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Epstein Was Just the Fall Guy

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Max Igan joins Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange to discuss Jeffrey Epstein, whose arrest and alleged suicide at a Federal detention facility in Lower Manhattan qualifies as one of the bigger stories of the past decade but which is being largely ignored in the mainstream media.

Igan notes that what’s so often overlooked are the details of Epstein’s unlikely rise to super-wealth. How was Epstein, a college drop-out able to get a job in 1974, teaching physics and calculus at Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton School, from which he was then fired in 1976 for “poor performance”?

From Dalton, he immediately landed a floor position trading securities for Bear Stearns and in four short year, he was made a partner there – and then fired the following year for violating a a securities trading regulation. 27 years later, the once-important global investment bank would collapse during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

The financial management company Epstein founded to manage the portfolios of billionaires has only ever had one known client, Les Wexner, who reportedly gave him the $77 million dollar mansion on the Upper East Side.

***

Max Igan: This house had something like 40 bedrooms…I mean, it’s ridiculous, you know when you look at his rise to fortune and there’s every indication that Jeffrey Epstein was simply a fall guy for the brownstone operations that were being run by the MEGA Group.

The MEGA Group is a group of very influential business people, such as Shimon Peres, Eric Bronfman, Lawrence Tish. I think that the Lauders are in there, from Estée Lauder.

Of course, Les Wexner is in there, as well. This is a group of very, very heavy-hitting billionaires who were really running this show and I think Epstein has taken a fall for these people…

Of course, all the debate is around whether Epstein is dead, whether he isn’t; whether he was spirited away; all that sort of stuff, which is kind of irrelevant, as we’ll never know.

What we do know is he’s out of the picture. For all intents and purposes, he’s dead – whether he’s alive or not – and that’s the way they want to keep it.

And they want to focus on him and they want to focus on his co-conspirators, like Prince Andrew and pretend that it’s just localized to Prince Andrew, as well; ‘he’s the only one in the Royal Family we should be concerned about’ – not mentioning Prince Charles’ relationship with Jimmy Savile.

I mean, this goes very very deep. What we see here, with this Epstein case really is the tip of the iceberg of the worldwide child trafficking network and the brownstone operations that he used to entrap politicians and entrap executives…

It appears that he was just given an unlimited amount of funds. They created a backstory of a ‘meteoric rise to fame’,  which would explain these funds and he was simply running brownstone operations [compromise] operations.

The way it would be [is]  you get a friend of Jeffrey Epstein to take you out for dinner, bring you back to the place; you get filmed having sex with an underage girl and then they’ve got you. That’s how you get everybody.

Once you’ve been caught, you know with an underaged person on camera, that’s it…You’ll never expose the fact that you’re even being blackmailed, because you did the wrong thing to begin with.

So it’s a perfect trap but that’s what I’m saying with this, is that Epstein is the fall guy; they don’t want you looking at the higher echelons. The fact that that Ghislaine Maxwell, as well – I mean, there isn’t an arrest warrant issued for her, yet…

There’s every indication that Jeffrey Epstein is simply a fall guy for this Mossad/CIA operation, that’s running all these things, worldwide. And I would wonder how many other islands there are like Jeffrey Epstein’s island…This surely is not the only person that’s doing this.”

Luke Rudkowski:  Everything kind of fits together, especially when you look at no trader on Wall Street having known him or traded with him. You look at the connections with DynCorp, especially with the planes that were registered in his name that were previously registered in DynCorp. There’s no other way to see this.

Now, some of the victims here actually came forward and said that Ghislaine Maxwell was actually even above Epstein. What do you think about that conclusion? And right now, we’re seeing a cover-up. Will this cover-up ever be exposed?

The Trump administration, under his Attorney General he’s talking about “A perfect storm of screw-ups.”

It’s not a perfect storm of screw-ups, we know that for sure. What do you think of Ghislaine Maxwell and this larger cover-up happening right now, Max?”

Max Igan: Absolutely. Ghislaine Maxwell is above Epstein. She was more of Epstein’s handler than anything else. She was the brains behind the operation. You would have needed someone like Ghislaine Maxwell to be doing it. She would have been the one going out there, seducing the politicians. Apparently, she’s very sexual, very open about it. Talks about oral sex a lot. Once they get guys back into that fold, get a young girl in to join in, have a threesome, get them on camera. That’s the way it works. She was most definitely the the brains behind the operation and Epstein’s the perfect fall go for it…

Everything was put in his name – of course, he’s the fall guy! Why would you put a $77 million mansion in his name? Apparently, he bought it for a dollar. This other report said he bought it for $20 million.

All the jets that were put in his name – everything that was put in his name – just the fact that it was in his name shows that he’s he’s not the one. He’s the fall guy because you just have to look at his meteoric rise to fame and Ghislaine Maxwell, the fact that there are no arrest warrants out for her. She’s got very, very high-level contacts and no, we won’t ever get any real justice from the legal system…

You might get a gung-ho lawyer and a gung-ho judge and all these people that want to do the right things but they’re only gonna get so high in the food chain and they’ll get a blockage.

They’ll get to something where it gets misdirected and then the case gets lost because they’ve just reached a point where someone who’s compromised and it’s the same in every organization doesn’t matter what it is; whether it’s industry or whether it’s THE science community, academia the legal system, the police system, the judges.

The law is a political system they’re all compromised. Otherwise, they do not get in that position to begin with it’s. it’s very important for people to understand this.

Alexandra Bruce

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

Contact



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Thursday, January 2, 2020

Subprime Will Be Back With A Vengeance In 2020

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Subprime Will Be Back With A Vengeance In 2020

Authored by Andrew Moran via LibertyNation.com,

One of the lasting legacies of the economic collapse a decade ago is subprime. After lying dormant for several years in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the subprime market has returned with a vengeance. Everything is subprime nowadays as banks, finance companies, and unconventional lenders are less averse to risk and are willing to extend credit to consumers with low FICO scores and inadequate incomes. As the great Yogi Berra used to say, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

In The Moody For Subprime

If you have poor credit and an interest in a home that is above your paygrade, then have no fear!

Moody’s Investor Service is out with a new report that predicts mortgage lenders will loosen their lending standards. In 2020, it is anticipated to be a lot easier for borrowers with bad credit to purchase a house as financial institutions attempt to offset the decline in affordable housing options.

Will the housing market be drowning in so-called liar loans – minimal income and document verification – over the next 12 months? Not quite, but Moody’s analyst Donald Lee wrote in the firm’s outlook that there will be “a high percentage” of loans with “limited or alternative documentation.”

Although most of the $11 trillion mortgage finance market consists of tight underwriting standards, you can anticipate an influx of unconventional loans that briefly exited the market following the housing crash. This means that new originators and issuers will set up shop and conduct transactions that are supported by closed-end second mortgages, home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), and loans backed by manufactured homes.

When you factor in banks lowering their down payment requirements and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac scooping up greater mortgages, the prognostications are most likely accurate. Plus, the increase in the number of consumers slipping into the subprime category has been steadily going up. Deutsche Bank data show a drop in credit scores for borrowers between the ages of 30 and 59.

But that is not all. The forecast also suggests that many of these subprime mortgages will be packaged into bond agreements without government financing. While Moody’s stopped short of citing a number, Bank of America Global Research analysts project a record $32 billion in bond issuance in 2020, up from $9 billion in 2018.

Subprime, loosened standards, and mortgage-backed securities (MBS): It’s 2006 all over again.

Revving Up Subprime Auto Loans

Subprime is prevalent in every facet of the credit industry. Indeed, we should be terrified of subprime mortgages leading to another day of reckoning. However, it is the subprime auto loan market that could be one of the drivers of the next financial crisis. And we are beginning to see the warning signs of a crash.

As Liberty Nation reported, subprime accounts for approximately one-third of the overall auto loan market. In the first half of 2019, a fifth of new auto loans went to subprime borrowers, totaling roughly $61 billion. So far, the results have not been pretty as more consumers are defaulting within the first few months of borrowing, leading to these loans being packaged into bonds.

Santander Consumer USA Holdings, one of the biggest subprime auto lenders, is witnessing a growing percentage of subprime auto loans defaulting at the fastest pace since 2008.

Banks and finance companies are adding fuel to the fire by increasing the length of these auto loans. Today, the average subprime new car loan is 72.9 months; some loan terms have reached 84 months. This signals that lenders are willing to take on more risk by waiting longer to be repaid. What has happened, however, is a dramatic spike in underwater trade-ins, known as a trade-in treadmill, which are vehicles that have little to no equity.

Investors may need to prepare for a head-on collision with this segment of the financial market.

I Am Optimus Subprime

The deteriorating credit conditions may surprise a lot of observers because of the booming economy. Despite more scores slipping and the quality of reports tumbling, credit demand remains strong as consumers continue to gorge on debt – total consumer debt jumped $18.6 billion in October, double from September. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) report has also noticed an interesting trend: Rejection rates for credit cards, mortgages, and mortgage refinancing have declined compared to last year. Lenders, enabled by the central bank’s easy money policies, are satisfying the appetites of these debt-addicted consumers, even if they cannot afford it. Does it come as a shock then that across-the-board delinquency rates are incrementally rising? The only solution to this, it seems, is to feed the beast until its belly explodes.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/02/2020 - 11:03

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"Revolutionary Changes In Public Opinion" - Gallup's Decade in Review: 2010-2019



Authored by Justin McCarthy, a journalist and analyst at Gallup, A review of Gallup analyses over the past decade reveals that the years from 2010 to 2019 bore witness to key revolutionary changes in public opinion, along with some persistent trends and concerns, as well as striking moments and las

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The Cold, Hard Facts Which Prove That The Past Decade Was Actually Quite Awful For The U.S. Economy



If this is what “the good times” look like, how nightmarish are “the bad times” going to be? In America today, more than 500,000 of us are homeless, about 40 million of us are living in poverty, 50 percent of all workers make less than $33,000 a year, and 70 percent of us have cried about mo

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